NAVYA operates in the autonomous vehicle market and has developed the first robo-taxi on the market in France.

Visa has announced that its suite of sensory branding that was flagged in December is now available as a pilot program. http://tinyurl.com/y9jmz7cg

Covering approximately 60% of the US POS terminal market, manufacturers Equinox Payments, Ingenico, Poynt, and Verifone will be working with Visa to pilot sensory branding with merchant partners in the coming year.

Visa, alongside most of the other ICS, is making the signature requirement optional for all EMV contact or contactless chip-enabled merchants in North America from April 2018. http://tinyurl.com/yaye2guu

ACQUIRING/PROCESSING, etc

A statement from Verifone said: ‘Earlier today, we experienced a service outage that affected connectivity to our Wynid gateway in France, and Ocius gateway in the UK. Services are now back to normal, and both data centres are now receiving transactions’.

ISSUING (VAS)

The programme is now available to financial institutions throughout Europe, enabling them to provide their customers with a range of exclusive services to enhance the airport travel experience for their Visa cardholders.

DIGITAL/RETAIL BANKING

ID documents, along with a selfie, are uploaded directly onto the app. With verification and authentication taking place in real-time, accounts can be opened in less than 10 minutes, including setting-up internet banking.

With nearly 2m customers claimed in Austria and the Czech Republic, Erste aims to introduce the platform in all of its seven markets (Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia). George has an open, API-based architecture and plug-in infrastructure that makes it customisable and flexible.

Following adoption of the RTS on separation of Schemes from Processing last October, the Council and European Parliament scrutinised the Regulation. No further changes were required and the Commission have now published the RTS establishing the requirements to ensure functional independence of payment card schemes and processing entities. These enter into force on 7 February 2018. http://tinyurl.com/y7zyoctc

The EBA has published a new webpage with links to the national registers of authorised or registered payment and e-money institutions (PIs and EMIs) under PSD 2 for those Member States that have provided the information. http://tinyurl.com/y9a629md

Envestnet | Yodlee is also supporting Open Banking with a single API solution aligned with PSD2 and Open Banking API specifications in the UK for account information services. http://tinyurl.com/y8fueoxc

Claiming to be first to market, Envestnet | Yodlee has built a robust consent architecture to provide developers with easy and compliant integration. No doubt there will be much more of this over the coming months.

CORPORATE ACTIVITY

The new combined entity will have a payment volume of US$1.5 trillion (£1.1 trillion), processing more than 40bn transactions annually through more than 300 payment types across 146 countries and 126 currencies. It will have a pro forma enterprise value of $31 billion (£23 billion).